


keep it upstairs

by dov



Category: El Internado | The Boarding School (TV)
Genre: Everyone Is Gay, F/F, Internalized Homophobia, Multi, POV Second Person, Pining, i'm a sucker for found families
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-03
Updated: 2018-03-03
Packaged: 2019-03-26 07:14:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,217
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13852731
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dov/pseuds/dov
Summary: you love her. you can't have her. this is how it goes.





	keep it upstairs

this is how it goes.

you’re fourteen years old and sharing a dorm with your best friend. you should be happy, like she is - she’s jumping up and down with joy in front of the room assignment noticeboard, enveloping you in her arms,  _isn’t this great vicky? a whole room to ourselves!_  but all you can do is swallow hard and manage a faint smile. she takes your hand and pulls you down the corridors to the girls’ wing and you hope your palms aren’t as sweaty as you think.

you love her.

you’re fifteen years old and you’re both studying for a math test. you’re on her bed, textbooks strewn haphazardly around the two of you, and she’s chewing on the end of the pen you lent her. her brows are furrowed in concentration and her hair is slowly coming loose from her ponytail but the way the soft lamplight falls over her face leaves you almost breathless. you want to reach out and tuck her flyaways behind her ear, but she sighs at the textbook and silently slips off the bed before you can try, oblivious. for some reason, that stings. more than it should.

you love her too much.

you’re sixteen years old and the freezing forest air nips at your face and you shiver but you don’t care because you’re sitting between carol and cayetano and she’s passing you the beer that iván smuggled in and you’re all laughing at something that roque said and your worries fade into the darkness. caye plays some music with his phone and you pull carol to her feet and dance with her. she laughs at you and you smile back, bright and wild as the sun. you’re frozen in that perfect moment for what seems like forever until iván’s  _be careful with my girl_ brings you crashing back to reality. you pull away from her, sitting back down beside caye, and the back of your neck burns with shame. iván takes your place with carol, the two of them dancing like idiots to the electro-pop blaring out of the speaker, and carol’s fingers tangle in iván’s hair as she pulls him in for a kiss.

she’s not yours.

caye notices you staring at her a little too long one day. he doesn’t say anything, he just gives you a long hard look and something passes between you both, unspoken. you remember how he looks at roque sometimes, and everything clicks into place. more and more, you find yourself confiding in him. he listens to your fears, your rants, the unfairness of it all, and gives you a shoulder to cry on when it all gets too much. you tell him  _i love her,_  you tell him  _i love her and i shouldn’t_ , and in the dark of the night he takes your hand in his and squeezes,  _i know_.

you try to move on.

 _vicky, can i ask you something?_  the rest of them have long since given up running laps to go hide in the bathrooms, but roque stills jogs along beside you.  _are you and caye, like, together?_  even though carolina had playfully teased you a few times about your new-found closeness with caye, this still throws you and you very nearly trip over your own shoelaces. you don’t know what to say - you’re not  _together_  together, not like carol and iván, but your relationship with caye feels like more than just friendship, existing somewhere beyond that. but how can you explain that to roque?  _no,_  you try,  _we’re not... i’m not--_ and you freeze, terrified of what you very nearly admitted. roque, unfazed, pulls you over to the back of the stables. you can feel the anxiety rolling of him in waves and he won’t meet your eyes as he asks  _do you think... i mean, do i, uh, would i have a chance with him?_

you want to laugh and sob at the same time.

you’re happy for caye and roque, you really are, but you can’t help kicking yourself every time you see them around school. iván said something stupid when he saw them holding hands for the first time, which you expected, but carol and marcos quickly told him off and soon cayetano gives his boyfriend a kiss in the hallway before class every day. seeing carolina and iván together always twists your stomach into knots, but seeing roque and cayetano makes you want to cry. then you feel guilty, because it’s not their fault that you were too scared to come out to your friends first, and it’s not their fault that you feel like you’ve missed your chance, but then this turns into self-loathing and a downward spiral that you don’t know how to get out of.

then everything falls apart.

of course cayetano’s death hits roque the hardest. none of you know how to comfort him, least of all you. you can’t even comfort yourself. you know it’s illogical but you feel responsible somehow, as if you were expelling too much negative energy into the atmosphere, or something, and this manifested in tragedy. the rest of them blame marcos, especially roque, but deep down you all know that it’s no one’s fault, it’s just this stupid fucking orphanage shit. it takes time, but you all admit that eventually. one night when you can’t sleep, you slip out of your room and down to the alcove in the library where you used to find caye but this time roque is there, hugging his knees to his chest. wordlessly you sit down beside him and he doesn’t acknowledge you until you put your arm around his shoulders and the moonlight catches on the tears in his eyes. in the dark of the night he tells you  _i loved him,_  he tells you  _i loved him and he’s gone_ , and you take his hand in yours and squeeze,  _i know_.

time passes.

the day julia medina trails into your room behind elsa and disappears out the window four minutes later, you instantly know something is about to change. one wink and a simple _pleased to meet you_  and suddenly you’re covering for her with héctor. when she waltzes into class half an hour late in  _that_  shirt and makes direct eye contact with you, you feel your cheeks burn and you rip your gaze away, trying to look anywhere but at the words written across her chest. she argues with héctor, and you lift your head again when you hear gasps ripple through the classroom, an involuntary reaction. you see her sitting there in nothing but her black bra, and you literally feel like you want to die. thankfully, she is sent of the room and you can finally breathe again.

that doesn’t last long.

you’ve played spin the bottle before. or at least tried to. it never worked among the five of you because you refused to kiss carolina and iván refused to kiss anyone who wasn’t carolina. when you invited other kids from your class, somehow you always ended up with diego varona’s tongue down your throat. so you don’t have a good track record with spin the bottle. but it’s a saturday night and diego has some kind of alcohol and roque manages to convince everyone that it’s the perfect thing to do to fill the cayetano-shaped hole in your lives, so most of your class meet at the bonfire pit in the forest at midnight. you and carol left julia asleep in your room, figuring that her second week at the boarding school was too soon to subject her to the game. mostly everyone is wasted by the fifth round, including you - marcos has given iván a peck on the cheek, there was some drama about someone kissing someone else’s boyfriend, diego made out with some girl from the class below who definitely shouldn’t be out drinking, and you’ve managed to escape your turn until now. you decide to just do it and get it over with, but a voice from behind you makes your world stop.  _hate to crash the party like this but it seems i wasn’t given an invite_.it’s julia. of course. she doesn’t join the circle - she seems content to hover over your shoulder and watch from afar, but you’re acutely aware of her presence. iván interrupts your mental turmoil with a  _come on, vicky, spin!_ so you give the bottle a half-hearted twirl, hoping to land on someone harmless, like roque. it doesn’t land on roque. it lands on carolina. of course. you’re about to forfeit, like you always do, but carol’s voice stops you, _vicky, it’s not like it means anything,_  and she’s right. it wouldn’t mean anything. carol loves iván. not you. you know this. you know this, and yet your throat burns and it’s pathetic but you’re going to cry if you kiss her and you’re going to cry if you don’t and you want more than anything for the ground to open up and swallow you because you don’t think there’s any way out of this until-- julia moves. she steps into the circle with a nonchalant  _i’ll do it_  and kisses carolina right on the lips. you could blame it on the alcohol, but there’s something familiar about the sick feeling at the pit of your stomach and you turn away, retching into the grass as the world starts to spin. 

of course.

you give julia a wide birth after that. then, she plays the whole  _i can talk to the ghost of your dead friend_  joke, and you decide that the feeling you get when you think about her is hatred. it has to be. but one night she wakes you up by screaming bloody murder at some godawful hour of the morning and you’re seconds away from throwing a pillow at her and telling her to shut up and go back to sleep, but when you look over you see that she’s not dreaming. she’s sitting bolt upright, glassy-eyed and pointing at some invisible thing at the foot of her bed.  _leave me alone!_ she’s whispering,  _you’re not real! this isn’t happening! you’re not real you’re not real you’redeadyou’redead_ and she’s crying. you call her name, trying to snap her out of it but she’s frozen, pointing, staring. you slip out of bed and move over to her, putting your hands on her shoulders to try and steady her.  _julia_ , you say, and this time her eyes lock onto yours.  _you’re safe_ , you tell her, and the tension in her spine releases.  _thank you_ , her voice is hoarse and you can barely make it out in the silence of the room. you’re suddenly aware of the lack of space between the both of you, and you’ve been holding her for far too long but you don’t move because you have to know,  _was it cayetano?_ and julia doesn’t meet your eyes. it’s a long time before she says  _you love her and you shouldn’t_.

that’s when you stop hating her.

with roque’s help, you convince the others that what julia says is true. you argue with marcos and bargain with carol and you make damn well sure that iván stops calling julia  _crazy_  before you all sit down and cayetano, through julia, tells you that iván’s father was his murderer. it’s hard to believe, especially for iván, but you trust caye and more than that, you trust julia. she’s part of the group now.

you trust her.

when you wake up in the middle of the night and she’s not in her bed, you worry. you go looking for her and end up in the library alcove again. she’s there, playing that annoying game on her phone, the blue of the screen illuminating her pale face in the dark. she snaps it shut when she sees you. you don’t sit down beside her, she rises to meet you and gently takes one of your hands in hers. she says  _thank you for believing me_. 

you think you love her.

you’re sixteen years old and you’re sitting in the boys’ room with your friends and you’re laughing at something that roque said and marcos and iván are playfighting over the last packet of chips and carolina is recording them and julia is beside you. she’s smiling at you, bright and wild as the sun, and everything leading up to this moment melts away as she leans over and presses her lips to yours. she is soft and warm and she smells faintly like the shampoo you lent her this morning. she kisses you, and breathless, you put your hands on her shoulders and gently push her away. blushing, you ask her  _what was that for?_  and she flicks her eyes over to carol and back and she says  _you owed me a kiss from that night in the forest_. you turn around to look at your friends, scared that they'll disapprove. instead, roque gently pats you on the back, carol and marcos share a knowing look, and iván doesn’t say anything stupid. sunlight spilling through the windows, you can see cayetano’s photo on roque’s nightstand and you lean back in to kiss julia.

you love her, and she loves you. 

that’s how it goes.

**Author's Note:**

> all el internado characters are gay and there's nothing u can do about it


End file.
